Eric Shepherd’s field promotion

October 6th, 2006Mozilla, Work 3 Comments

Eric Shepherd (aka “sheppy”) has been part of Mozilla for half a year now. In the past six months he’s not only dug in and written some vital and high-quality documentation, he’s also integrated himself well into the developer community as a whole. His skill and experience are such that we’re expanding his responsibilities to encompass all things related to Mozilla developer documentation as our new Developer Documentation Lead.

So from here on in, if you have questions about the MDC documentation or wikis, Eric’s the person you should talk to first and he’ll be the guy making final decisions on related issues. Congratulations Eric, and thanks :)

3 Responses to “Eric Shepherd’s field promotion”

  1. bodensatz Says:
    October 6th, 2006 at 5:49 pm

    I’ve got a lot of respect for someone who does documentation, especially “vital and high-quality” stuff. By far the hugest problem with FOSS these days is the lack of good documentation, especially for non-techies. I recall way back during my first stint as a UNIX Sys-Admin in 1991 at the university, when I was asked by someone in the Math Dept to install LaTex onto the server. I struggled with that sucker for a couple of months before I finally gave up. Problem was that the installation docs – what litter there were – assumed you were a hard-core LaTex user, and I didn’t know a damned thing about it.

    Fortunately we have come a long way since then, and there are lots of great FOSS projects these days that do have good docs. Unfortunately there are still a lot which do not.

    I’ve always said at work that if you aren’t spending at least 5% of your time documenting in detail what you do, then neither you nor your manager are doing your jobs. I document everything I do in a wiki as well.

    Congrats Eric!

  2. funTomas Says:
    October 7th, 2006 at 5:44 am

    Well, documenting of any project is a MUST if the project is to be used by humans. Anyway, I completely agree with bodensatz. Sun had IMO quite on time realized this issue and created doc comments in Java. I just wonder what processes, technologies and paterns are in use by Mozilla Doc team.
    Congrats Eric.

  3. funTomas Says:
    October 7th, 2006 at 6:44 am

    Well, documenting of any project is a MUST if the project is to be used by humans. Anyway, I completely agree with bodensatz. Sun had IMO quite on time realized this issue and created doc comments in Java. I just wonder what processes, technologies and paterns are in use by Mozilla Doc team.
    Congrats Eric.

Leave a Reply

Icons by N.Design Studio. Designed By Ben Swift. Powered by WordPress and Free WordPress Themes
Entries RSS Comments RSS Log in